Notes from the Week

So yeah, I'm not blogging so much these days. Here's some stuff, though.

Dancing things are being inconvenient this month. There are new salsa classes and tango classes, both of which I would have considered taking if I weren't already skipping swing to write a novel. Ragtime Ball tickets sold out in the blink of an eye, which is kind of a mixed blessing -- again, more writing time, but no Ragtime for me.

I got kind of sick yesterday, which definitely impaired both productivity and enjoyment for the weekend. Blah. But I think I'm getting better, so I'll probably be okay tomorrow.

The novel (still untitled) is going decently well. It's been pretty fun so far, though the process is painfully slow at times. I barely kept up yesterday, but today was more prolific.

I finally got a chance to finish reading The Basic Eight. As I may have mentioned before, Daniel Handler is a fantastic writer. And when I reached the end of this book I realized that I now have to read the entire thing over again because it will all be different, knowing what I know now. Very cool, though a bit frustrating as well, since I don't really have the time to be reading books twice. Later, maybe.

The Beginning

Here we are at Day One, and the new novel has begun. Read along if you like at NanoGraham (site feed).

All Novel's Eve

Here it is again, the night before November. I've managed to work up some various bits of ideas for the next novel, luckily. No title, but some character names, situations, and the beginnings of a plot. Not enough to keep me from being nervous, but it should do. I won't be able to start writing until at least 8 PM tomorrow night, I'm afraid, but the first installment should be posted towards the end of the evening.

As for Halloween, the scariest part of tonight involved hula dancing. Two itty bitty girls dressed as hula dancers came trick-or-treating, and we asked them (very nicely) if they wanted to dance for us. They seemed too shy, so a bunch of us (three or four grownups) started humming encouragingly and waving our arms and shaking our hips in typical pseudo-hula fashion. The girls actually hid behind their mom and wouldn't take candy from us. I had to go put candy in the bags for them while I apologized. I felt very bad about it, though it was hilarious as well.

Cross Step Left Turn Pivots

At Friday Night Waltz last night, I was doing some cross step waltz and started thinking about the left turn pivot move. Richard had some tango-y name for it, I think, which I can no longer remember. It's the one where you cross into the middle of the room, then do three left turn pivots, then start a follow-cross-behind grapevine on 5, finishing up with more grapevine steps and an underarm turn. Anyway, it's a fun one, especially once you get the hang of keeping the turns tight enough to actually be able to lead that first cross-behind step.

But what I was noticing last night was that this move starts with a fantastic flurry of energy, which can be great for matching something dramatic in the music. The reverse direction and the acceleration and the zippy little pivots are really fun for that. But after that the momentum kind of dies with the grapevine, because all of a sudden you're not turning anymore, and you've got several steps to kill before the underarm turn. So it's not necessarily the best followup if the music isn't also winding down there.

Eric was kind enough to help me experiment with this a bit during a break, and I found that one simple thing to do is to just add two more pivots after the first three. It keeps the spinning going longer and it isn't actually too hard to then open up and go back to the right turning basic step afterwards. So not fancy, but it works.

An idea that didn't work was to add the 5-6 right turn pivot move at the end (going into an underarm turn on 1). It seemed good in theory (and on my own in the hallway) since I liked the idea of the direction changing pivots. But with an actual partner it turns out that your feet are align entirely wrong. You've got left feet in the middle for the left pivots, and there's no way to get right feet in the middle in time for the right pivots. Bummer.

Eric also came up with the cool idea of going into the first two grapevine steps only, then the underarm turn on 1, snagging the extra hands on the way to get into matador position. That was really slick, and probably the best idea we ended up with. I need more practice doing things from matador position, though, so I could do that and still have a good followup.

Anyone else have any good ideas for what to do after left turn pivots?

No Soy Salsero

There's a new series of dance classes on Tuesday nights in Palo Alto, run by the FNW folks (info on their website). I managed to get over there in time for the salsa class last night, after the library. (I've been really needing to learn salsa for a while, if you haven't heard me bemoan that recently. Hustle's on that list, too, and some other things.) I got roped in as a demo partner for the end of the Congress of Vienna lesson that was wrapping up, which was kind of fun. The salsa class itself was interesting, and Anne is a fantastic teacher, but it all just feels so foreign to me. It's like oil and water. And I think I'm just not used to both taking truly beginning level classes and having it be difficult. My brain just doesn't want to accept the fact that I'm not waltzing. Oh well. I want to go back and keep trying, but unfortunately, it's not a series class. Next week there will be cha-cha though, so I might go to that, and then some other latin dances, and probably more salsa again at some point, though I don't know if it will come around again soon enough for me to build on last night's class. We'll see.